SWITCH
Your pharmacy switch connects your computers, phones, printers, cameras and more together. A switch serves as a controller to enable the devices plugged into them the ability to talk to each other efficiently. All of your pharmacy data drops are routed back to your switch and patch panel.
Your switch is usually very reliable and most of them last for over 5 years with no issues. Some older pharmacies will use multiple small switches if their store is not wired/cabled properly. We recommend only using one main switch. The more switches you have in your pharmacy the more room for error or something to go bad. These switches come in 24, 48 and more ports. Most pharmacies can get away with a 48 port switch but if your pharmacy is rather large with a lot of computers and printers you may want to look at larger switches
A modern switch may implement power over Ethernet (PoE), which avoids the need for attached devices, such as VOIP phones to have a separate power. Another device that can be powered by your switch is your credit card terminals, sometimes those have the PoE option and only need 1 cord going to the back of the device.
